Page 83 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Brand ng the Globe

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002; Morley, David. Home Territories: Media,
Mobility and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2000; Naficy, Hamid. The Making of Exile
Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993; Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998.
Aswin Punathambekar

Branding the gloBe

Global advertising is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it has been
credited with creating new markets, improving economies and connecting peo-
ple worldwide through trade in consumer goods. On the other hand, it has been
criticized for spreading consumer culture to every corner of the globe through
the growth of multinational corporations and their advertising agencies as they
preach the gospel of capitalist development. What are some of the intended and
unintended effects of global advertising?
Globalization has been led mainly by economic interests in the Western
world. During the closing decades of the twentieth century, helped in no small
way by emerging digital communication technologies, international markets
across the globe began to be opened up by multinational corporations and their
advertising agencies. Modern media allow advertisers to spread unified brand-
ing campaigns, or global advertising messages around the world at a phenom-
enal rate through the global media. Because of this rapid communication and
advanced transport and delivery systems, companies like eBay and Starbucks,
for example, have been able to build in a few short years what corporations like
Coca-Cola and General Electric took over a century to establish. Thus, Western
multinational corporations were able to establish great wealth in the twentieth
century through unprecedented global growth.
In a 2005 Interbrand study of the world’s top 100 global brands, over 50 per-
cent were U.S. corporations and 40 percent were European-based. Less than
10 percent of the top global brands were headquartered in Asia and none in
Africa. However, the world is changing and as the markets in developing coun-
tries begin to grow, the effects of global advertising on consumer culture may
have unintended effects.

ThE origins oF ThE muLTinaTionaL CorPoraTion
The roots of the modern multinational corporation can be traced back to the
1600s, when the English monarch granted a charter to the British East India
Company to establish overseas commercial and trade interests. Holland char-
tered the Dutch East India Company for the same purposes. These two compa-
nies were probably the first truly multinational corporations. These companies
and others like them colonized their chartered territories on behalf of sponsor-
ing monarchs. Before the twentieth century, economic expansion had been the
exclusive domain of national governments either directly or through charters.
But starting in the early 1900s, corporations began to take over this role.